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Loneliness was assessed in the Opinion Survey collected by the Office of National Statistics in August 2011. The question asked to assess loneliness was “Overall, how lonely did you feel yesterday?”, which differed from the question used in July 2011, which was “How lonely do you feel in your daily life?”.

A small proportion of respondents reported being highly lonely (4.7%). However, the majority of respondents (53.1%) reported that they were not lonely at all. This means that it may be more suitable to investigate the determinants of whether people report being lonely at all, rather than investigate what makes people lonelier.